Shenzhen Huaqiangbei Trip 2026

[ian]

A very sad trip to Mingtong Building (Dodgy Phone Market). This was a fabulous market with weird and wonderful mobiles phones on the first four floors. Some phones I recall:

• Credit card sized phone
• 90s shaped giant phones with huge batteries and a flashlight for African markets where charging requires a trip into town. On startup the display had a nice giraffe animation.
• All kinds of “bling” phones shaped like various cars
• Phones with a built in flame-less lighter
• Highly ruggedized phones

The top floor had the less than legal stuff. The one I remember best is the iPhoney. It looks exactly like an iPhone color running ios skinned Android. The logo on the back is an Android robot, but give it a wipe with some alcohol and it disappears to reveal the Apple logo. It was an absolutely terrible phone, but the logo reveal was delightful.

And now… It’s a dodgy cosmetics and beauty supply market! It looks abandoned, but actually it doesn’t open until after 3PM. I could not discern why, maybe to align with exports to EU and US time zones?

Sign at the front warns about fake brands, contaminated cosmetics, and illegal weight loss drugs. The phones may be gone, but apparently it’s still plenty dodgy.

Mingtong was a bummer, so here’s a small bonus. The sign making street in Dongmen is still very active. All of these shops make various kinds of inexpensive custom signage.This was during a typhoon, so I just took a quick shot when it wasn’t pouring rain.

[ian]

A couple days ago I started a small side quest. Aunties stand around in huaqiangbei holding business cards that advertise replica watches, handbags, etc. I’ve never had any interest because Luohu Commercial City (copy mall) is a six floor market dedicated to that kind of stuff.

An auntie hit me up and I thought it might be interesting to see how it works. I followed her to the elevator of a market building, but it had a ~30 minute line of couriers with carts grabbing electronic component stock from the apartment/warehouses above. I didn’t want to wait to go up, and I didn’t want to get stuck up there in a hard sell situation so I bailed.

Well, it turns out there is a wholesale watch market in a corner of huaqiangbei! I’m specifically interested in mechanical watches because they have a lot of precision stamped, milled and assembled parts - for incredibly low prices.

I know nothing about watches, but here’s some of the Chinese brand self winding mechanical watches that stood out to me. Sellers initially asked $120+, and specifically suggested they could give me a little discount. A Taobao image search shows the going price is closer to $25USD.

Of course you can order a custom watch with your favorite wrist band, dial, hands, jewels, etc.

My question is where do the stamped and milled parts come from? Various answers - metal/plastic wristbands come from Shenzhen, the mechanical bits from Guangzhou or Shanghai. There was no single answer. These posters advertise custom hands from a factory located in Dongguan, and that feels like the right answer to me.

Several stands have wholesale clocks and e-watches.

Of course, the big draw for all the other foreigners at the market are the high quality brand replicas. It’s what everyone wanted to show me first, but aside from Rolex I have no clue if a brand is famous or not.

I did read about this collab in my local paper, but not because of the branding. The line at the Amsterdam Swatch shop go so long and unruly the release was canceled over safety concerns (London as well?).

Two version were available: battery and manual wind mechanical. They strongly urged me to get the battery version because the mechanical version needs to be wound every 30 hours or so. It’s just going to end up in my box of market trinkets (or a table at congress) so that’s not a huge selling point.

Paid way more than I should have, but I did an extensive Taobao search and the mechanical version is not available anywhere else.

[mbrugman]

The mechanical watches would have my attention for a while, too. Love that kind of thing.

[Taniwha]

Yeah there were a lot of people on HQB trying to interest us in watches when we were there in Dec, probably more than any other things - there was a block or two of watch stores a little bit off of HQB that I had to walk past to get my packages at the SFExpress office (I’d mislabeled the hotel address), people would always come out as I walked by

[ian]

Next to last day and a lot going on. I was 50% successful in my final challenge. Need to go back tomorrow.

[masterX244]

what challenge?

[ian]

Asia’s largest jewelry market is in Shenzhen between the Shuibei and Tianbei stations on the #2 line. It is significantly larger than all of Huaqiangbei. Most of it is finished gold/silver/jade/etc jewelry wholesale, but the interesting bit (to me) are the equipment and component markets.

Our quest is to buy gemstones, have them tested and get a certificate of authenticity. Only my terrible Mandarin, no translators or English allowed!

This one is going to be light on wide-angle/overview photos. Photography is generally frowned on because of the high value of the merchandise (what, you casing the joint?!). I’m extra timid because I was once asked to leave a shop in this market because I’m not a serious buyer.

Packaging and display related shops are interspersed among the shops selling finished jewelry.

All manner of cord for stringing jade/stone beads and pearls.

After a bit of hunting I found a loose gem shop on the top floor of Shuibei International Jewellery Exchange Center. This is a bit too fancy, everything is well displayed and the cheapest stone is ~$35.

Eventually we hit the jackpot at Gold Plaza. Almost every floor has multiple loose gem shops.

That’s more like it! Things in piles! Still a bit out of our range, those tiny multicolored sapphire stones start at $45.

This is it! The only shop with any kind of price display. Whatever these are, they start at $2-$3USD per carat.

We have two little gems, total cost $8! Now let’s get them tested and certified!

There is at least one government licensed testing center in each market building. This is the smallest I saw, with the highest prices - it pays to shop around a bit. For common stones like ours testing runs from $2.50-$8, and takes about 2 hours.

But there’s a wrinkle! Our stones turn out to be garnet and topaz. They won’t test them! Why? I think because they’re too common to be tested. There were a lot of words and the only thing I’m certain of is that we’re not getting a test.

The goal was to return today, buy a lab grown diamond and get a certificate of authenticity. Between copious lab grown diamonds and falling marriage rates, evidently China has tanked the diamond market. Not that diamonds actually had value in the first place beyond the monopoly and marketing hype.

This Taobao shop has a 0.1 carat diamond for $7, and a half carat for $40. Conversion seems to be 100 分 (points, pennies, 1/100th) = 1 carat; each 分 adds 0.1mm diameter depending on the cut; 0.5 carat seems the minimum average wedding diamond. The internet tells me in the west a 1 carat lab grown diamond goes for around $1300USD, so the $40 half carat seems like a real bargain. I’m sure there’s more to it, but I’ve only been in the market for a diamond for 24 hours.

Unfortunately it poured rain all day. It’s not much fun to run around markets in soaked shoes, so this quest will have to continue on my next visit to Shenzhen.

Lots more market exploration photos to post, but next two days are travel days. I’ll resume early next week.

[ian]

Found out a bit about the lab grown diamond situation. Diamonds are much better at heat exchange than copper, so the impact on the jewellery diamond market is a secondary hit. They’re making heat spreaders/conductors to embed in AI and quantum computing chips.

[henrygab]

I worked a summer doing QA in a Jewerly factory just outside Boston, MA (USA). One thing we had to do in QA was to individually validate each diamond was actually diamond (low trust in the factory floor, I guess). The tester was a little pen-like device, which heated up the copper tip, and (somehow) detected the heat transfer. I suppose things that transfer heat that well don’t tend to look like diamonds.

Fascinating to hear they are now using lab-generated diamond for heat spreaders for the AI chips!

[ian]

That’s super interesting and makes total sense with context.

It’s often educational go to markets that I wouldn’t otherwise be interested in. The scale and horizontal/vertical integration of everything is intense. If you pick at a thread there’s way more depth than you expect.

One market I wanted to hit but didn’t have a chance, is the Shaibu fabric markets. What’s interesting about fabric? (Well, a lot, but…) For me it’s the buttons and zippers! Plastic, ceramic, metal, mother of pearl. Stamping, carving, multicolor molding, printing/painting, etc etc. So many processes for something so common it it costs a fraction of a cent.

[ian]

Duhui Electronic City (“tool building”) sits behind HQ1. Along with the typical assortment of components, it has a few floors with tool vendors.

Typical stands with display cases, tons of reels, etc.

What has always made this building special is the wide selection of electronics related tools, specifically prototype and hand assembly stuff. This is the OG stand with solder, irons, flux, cleaning tools, microscopes, hot plates, and a desktop re-flow oven. Elsewhere you can find, for example, soldering iron tip manufactures with a full line of tips available over the counter.

This is another OG shop with lots of soldering stations, hot air tools, and solder pots for dip soldering through hole parts.

Unfortunately the stand had no context to suggest what these are for. My guess is replacement controllers for some kind of ancient production line equipment. It seems a few have been scavenged for parts. Upper left is missing the main controller chip, while center bottom is missing five socketed chips.

As we saw with other markets, lots of empty stands. The tool building was always a bit of a trends showroom. For a while it was full of nearly the same but slightly different table top reflow ovens. I bought one on my first trip and shipped it back to myself (terrible tool! hated it!).

Later, there were a dozen different manufacturers selling slight variations of the Neoden table top pick and place. Maybe there will be trend that fills these stands again, but at the moment it looks a bit sad.

[ian]

I was on the hunt for the “coin mining rig” of locally hosted LLM boxes. Didn’t really find that, but this seems to be a commercially available LLM rack server module thing.

Not sure how the uploaded version will look, but the gist is that they take 8x 5090-32GB graphics cards and 8x64GB DDR5. A random stall quoted me 30000RMB (4500USD) for the 32GB 5090. I have no idea if that is an accurate price, but wow.

I had a few more market reports and miscellaneous Shenzhen stuff but my trusty S20 died. It got wet, fell apart and now I see the battery is puffy. Unfortunately this didn’t happen in Shenzhen, because I could have it fixed.

[ian]

BTW: if anyone wants the semi precious stones/gems please PM me. I have no use for them and it would be a pity to throw them away. They had to be dug up, cut, etc.